How things change in one year!
At the beginning of 2021 everybody seemed perplexed that the much anticipated first wave of Covid-19 had somehow swept past India without causing much damage. 'The virus cannot survive the pollution levels here!', sniggered the wags and carried on with their lives.
People were just beginning to take it easy when the second wave - the Delta variant - blindsided us in March 2021. Suddenly all the hospitals were struggling to cope with a deluge of patients and distraught families. Just about everybody seemed to be desperately looking for oxygen cylinders, medicines, oxygen concentrators and reliable test kits. By July, nearly half a million people had died on the official records with speculation rife on the scale of unreported deaths.
When Delta gave way to Omicron there was much talk on how the healthcare system had been geared up to meet the challenge. Skeptical as always, I thought this was bluster - just the sort of pep-talk expected from politicians to keep a lid on panic levels. It took a first-hand experience for me to realise how wrong I was!
We started 2022 on a positive note from our RTPCR test labs. It had started with a throat irritation and telltale signs of a fever. When a number of friends who attended a Christmas party started testing Covid-positive, we knew that ours was not the winter usual viral. The tests only confirmed this but what surprised me is the way in which the healthcare system had actually been geared up to cope with this new wave.
Within an hour of calling a private testing lab (SRL), a sample collector was at our doorstep (~INR 900 / ~USD 12 per test). The RTPCR reports arrived online a day later, on a Saturday. It is mandatory for the private labs to send a copy of the reports to the state health department also gone to the UP government health department, and we were pleasantly surprised to see how the SoPs clicked into place.
On Monday morning a young government doctor visited us to collect first-hand data, to check if home-isolation was being strictly followed, and to hand over free kits of medicines. A team was sent across to spray and disinfect the apartment tower and, for the next week, we got at least one call a day from the 'Central Covid Control Room' to check if the infection had aggravated in any way. Thankfully, it did not. The infection was as mild as it could be - fever for a day, a sore-throat for two.
As per the new guidelines, at the end of a seven-day isolation period, it is no longer mandatory to take another RTPCR test but we got tests done anyway using the new Rapid Antigen Tests that were now easily available on Amazon. Interestingly, these tests were no longer being imported from Germany, South Korea or China but made locally by a company called MyLab and sold for just INR 250 (~ USD 3.5) each. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into the design and production of these kits, each of which contains a sterile swab, a pre-filled extraction tube, test-card, instruction manual (English/Hindi) and a disposal pouch.
One of these days I hope to understand more about the kind of technology and production systems that it takes to prototype and scale up production of these kits ("with immunochromatographic nitrocellulose assay...which uses highly sensitive antibodies to detect Covid-19 nucleocapsid proteins.."), to the current levels of 10 million sets per week!
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REFERENCES & LINKS
* https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/coronavirus-how-india-is-doing-now-after-delta-variant-spread.html
* MyLab - wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mylab_Discovery_Solutions#cite_note-1
* Pune start-up makes affordable, accessible Covid-19 test kit (March 2020) - https://www.financialexpress.com/lifestyle/health/pune-start-up-makes-affordable-accessible-covid-19-test-kit/1908524/
* Producing 10 million kits per week - https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/indias-mylab-can-ramp-up-covid-19-test-production-100-mln-units-per-week-ceo-2021-05-21/
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